This post is a paid partnership with Bambu Lab. Every printed piece on this table came off the printer at home, and all opinions are my own.
Back in August I wrote about the six things we 3D printed to make meal prep easier, and that post was about the printer earning its place as a kitchen tool. This one is the other end of the week. We stayed in for date night and printed the table. The lamp, the candle holders, the coasters, the vase, the blue discs under the bowls, the little stands holding the place cards. All of it came off the printer in the corner of the room, in three colors, and then we cooked gnocchi.
Going out is expensive and the food at ours is better, so staying in was never the hard part. But how do you upgrade your everyday dining table and make it feel special enough for date night? What changes one into the other is almost entirely decor, some fresh flowers, and a nice playlist.
What actually makes a table feel like a restaurant
Two things, and neither of them is expensive objects.
The first is light. Ceiling lights off, something warm and low switched on instead. Restaurants all do this, and it works because light coming from below your eyeline is softer on everyone at the table.
The second is height. A flat table of flat things looks like dinner. Put a lamp, a vase and a few candles at different heights along it and it looks like an occasion. That’s the whole trick. Everything below is really just those two ideas in Baby Blue, Ivory White and Dark Chocolate.
The lamp does most of the work
A little lamp on the table was my idea from the start, and I love how this one turned out. This is the piece that changed the room rather than the table. It’s about 18 x 18 x 26 cm assembled, printed in ivory white matte, and the pleats break the light up so you get a soft glow instead of a bright spot. The shade took around 3.9 hours and the base and socket holders another 2.7, so it’s an afternoon of printing rather than a quick one. There’s no clever bulb in it either, just a cheap color-changing LED, so you can set the light to different colors to suit the rest of the table.
I loved it so much that I moved it to our bedroom to use as a side lamp, and I have another one in the workroom to gift to my little niece. She’s going to love reading with this and changing all the colors.
Model: The Swirl Lamp by SoDR
The tea light holders
Three fluted holders in baby blue, printed as a set on a single plate in about 7 hours for all three. They’re deliberately different heights, which is the height trick from earlier doing its job in miniature.
These hold LED tea lights rather than real ones. Cam measured the cups at 40 mm across and 20 mm deep before printing, and the LED tea lights we already had drop straight in at stock size with the flame tip sitting just above the rim, so there was no scaling to work out. More on why they’re LED further down.
Model: Tea Light Holder Set “Bubble” by Steffen Döhler
The coasters are the ones I use most
These were one of my picks. White with a blue scalloped edge, and they stack into a matching caddy, which is the part that makes them get used instead of scattered. The full set printed in under 2 hours across two plates, so this is the one to start with if you want something on the table tonight.
That blue edge is the AMS swapping color partway through the print. It’s the detail I didn’t expect to care about and now do.
Model: Scalloped Cloud Coaster Set with Holder by Nexemarald
Everything else on the table
The rest is the supporting cast, and all of it came off the same three rolls of filament. Every one of these is linked to the exact model we printed, so you can go straight to the designer who made it:
- Bubble Vase in baby blue, around 8 hours, holding the flowers in the middle of the table.
- Bubble Coaster scaled all the way up to 240 mm to make the beaded chargers under the bowls. These take 5 hours 13 minutes and about 215 g of filament each.
- Decorative Coffee Table Tray in dark chocolate, the ribbed one the vase sits on. It fits the 256 mm bed in one piece.
- Candle Stick Holder the stacked spheres, printed as a pair in dark chocolate.
- Linen Loops napkin rings which are customizable, so ours have our names on them. They take about an hour each.
- Simple Place Card Holder by Quorlan, which takes minutes and is the detail people comment on first.
What we didn’t print
The bowls and plates are glazed stoneware in chocolate, and that was a deliberate call rather than a gap in the plan. Nothing printed touches food here. Printed parts have fine layer lines that hang onto whatever sits on them, and they can’t take a hot wash, so anything food touches directly should be ceramic or glass. The goal is to make bespoke cute decor we will want to use again and again, not single-use items, so we only print things that are durable. Everything we print goes under, around, or beside the food. And we used a large glass jar to store the water and the flower before adding to the bubble vase.
A note on candles, because this one matters
The tea lights in the blue holders are LED, and that’s a safety decision as much as a styling one. PLA softens at a low temperature, so a real flame sitting down inside a printed cup is the one combination to avoid.
The two taper candles in the chocolate candlesticks are real. The designer of that model flags the same thing on the model page and suggests a metal insert or LED tapers if the candles are going to burn for a long stretch, which is good advice. Light them while you’re sitting at the table, don’t let them burn down to the base, and don’t leave the room with them going. LED tapers are the easier answer if you’d rather not think about it, and at this distance nobody can tell.
A quick note on the material
Most of what we print is PLA. It’s a plastic, but a plant-based one made from corn and sugarcane rather than crude oil, and one of the few that can be industrially composted at end of life. I’d rather say that accurately than pretend it isn’t a plastic at all.
The blue pieces here are printed in PLA Pure, which Bambu Lab makes from five ingredients that are each certified against the European standard for food-contact materials, and certified for indoor air quality as well.
How the printing actually goes
This is the P2S with the AMS sitting on top, which is the four-spool feeder that handles the color changes. The workflow hasn’t changed since the last post and it still feels like it should be harder than it is: find a model in the Bambu Handy app, tap print, pick the color, go and do something else.
The models all come from MakerWorld, where designers upload their files for anyone to print. The one piece of actual work in this whole table was deciding on three colors and sticking to them. A printed table in six colors looks like a toy box. In three it looks like a set.
What we cooked
- Sheet Pan Pumpkin Gnocchi with Roasted Veggies and Tahini Sauce, which serves two, takes 45 minutes and is almost all oven time, with 25 g of protein and 19 g of fiber a serving.
- No-Bake Mini Chocolate Tart for dessert, which you make earlier in the day and leave in the fridge to set, so there’s nothing to do after dinner.
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